


Three Hearts

by monkeystypinghamlet



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Last Jedi spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-20 07:29:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13141932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monkeystypinghamlet/pseuds/monkeystypinghamlet
Summary: When Rey left the star destroyer and Kylo Ren behind, she didn’t know what she was more afraid of: that their connection would open up again or that it wouldn’t.*** Spoilers for The Last Jedi ***





	1. Chapter 1

When Rey left the star destroyer and Kylo Ren behind, she didn’t know what she was more afraid of: that their connection would open up again or that it wouldn’t.

She’s never going to forget how she felt when she woke up and saw Luke’s lightsaber broken in two pieces and Kylo lying face down on the opposite side of the blood-red room. She was surprised at how she felt seeing him surrounded by dead bodies, given she had always thought of him as the monster. Yet these were people that she had helped kill. 

She thought about this as she noticed that their electricity was still there. It was pulsating in the very air that hung between them. It didn’t feel like the balance that Luke had described. It felt alive. Rey spent almost every day of her childhood doing the exact same thing, living out the exact same routine. She doesn’t know where to place this feeling.

His words echoed round in her head, to follow her until she died: _You’re nothing. But not to me._

She stood there – wondering what to do, wondering if he was about to wake up, wondering if she wanted him to – and she desperately wanted to believe him. She had wanted so badly to take his hand and jump headfirst into the unknown with him to live a great adventure. To have someone standing by her side, always there and always coming after her. Those used to be things she longed for. He knew that. He had seen into that part of her.

But those words had come from Kylo Ren, not Ben Solo. They were words that tore her to shreds before picking her back up off the ground. He said he wanted to let the past die, but Rey couldn’t forget it. He had tortured her. He had held her captive. He had tried to kill her. She should be dead at his hands. He only admired her so for resisting it.

Rey wanted nothing to do with Kylo Ren.

She was picking up the pieces of Luke’s lightsaber when he started to stir. She froze. He pushed up off the floor, wincing as fresh blood oozed out of the scar down his face. He stood up to meet her, face to face. His gaze was glued onto her. She watched it shift to the fleeing rebel ships.

“So you’re just going to let them die,” Rey said, still furious. Kylo’s eyes moved back to her. “I can’t do that.” As she finished speaking, there was a loud whirring from the end of the red room. The elevator was in motion. Rey’s heart started beating again. It could be a whole fleet of stormtroopers for all she knew.

“You stole Snoke’s escape pod,” Kylo said.

“What?” Kylo picked up a rod off the floor that used to belong to a Praetorian guard.

“You struck me from behind and stole Snoke’s escape pod,” Kylo said. He held the rod out in front of him. Rey stared at him.

“I can’t,” she whispered in disbelief. The whirring stopped.

“Do it,” he said. Rey lifted the rod.

 

As the pod travelled through space towards the Falcon, Rey kept waiting for their electricity to break. She thought that if she got far enough away, it would snap like a great long stretched piece of string. At the very least, she thought that it would fade away into the back of her mind and she wouldn’t feel its presence any more. 

But the opposite happened. Rey could feel it growing inside her. She could feel the pain that she had caused by striking him and knew when he woke up inside that red room to Hux standing over him. She had thought he had a strong bond with Hux but now she knows it is merely wafer thin. Rey recognises the way that Kylo feels because it is what she has been carrying all these years: pure loneliness.

 

Chewbacca told Rey that he had picked up Leia’s distress signal from Crait and set the coordinates of the Falcon accordingly.

“That was lucky,” Rey said.

She didn’t tell him that she knew Kylo was already there.

 

As Rey opened her eyes to see all the rocks floating around her, the first thing that she saw was Finn. And without thinking, without breathing, their arms were around each other. This is my family, Rey thought. This is my past. I can’t leave them behind. They shouldn’t have to die so that I can find a future. Kylo could take his destroy everything mission across the galaxy if he wanted. She wasn’t going to part of it. She wasn’t about to abandon the first people in her life to give her more than a second glance. The resistance believed in her long before Kylo did. She would stay by their side.

Once everyone was safely onboard, she channelled their electricity and told Kylo this. That she is done. She can’t be part of his destruction. She shut the door on it, forever, and left him crouched on the ground.

 

All this plays through Rey’s mind whenever she is asleep. She wakes up halfway through the morning, panting and on the verge of screaming because she doesn’t know where it is supposed to lead. She can’t count the number of days that have passed since they left Crait, and she still always wakes up like this. She has long stopped thinking that one day she might exist without this feeling. She wants to get rid of the electricity coursing through her veins. But no power of thinking will rid her of it. How can she get rid of something that’s inside her?

 

She wakes up every day feeling the same pull that she felt when she launched out of the Falcon and onto Snoke’s ship to save Ben. She knew he was still there; she hadn’t imagined it. 

She had tried to find him and bring him home. She hated thinking that she failed.


	2. Chapter 2

Should she have asked him to come with her?

It’s clear he thought that their future was supposed to be spent together. They just had different ideas of what it looked like.

Rey throws back her covers and buries her head in her hands. The compound isn’t alive yet, there is still plenty of time before everyone else awakes. Rey is used to this. 

She isn’t very good at staying still. 

She has no idea how she managed to do it for so many years. The resistance has been on Fryst for a fraction of the time that she spent on Jakku, and she’s already going crazy. She’s no use in the endless meetings that General Leia seems to have. She understands that they’re important, but Rey doesn’t have anything to say. Nothing to add beyond what the others have already though of. Strategy has never been Rey’s strong point. She’s better at getting things done and she’s frustrated that she can’t do that. Instead, she hovers on the edge of the control room nodding at things that other people say. After days of running from what’s trying to kill her, it seems counterintuitive to stay in the same place for so long.

It’s great to be back alongside Finn, and she’s beyond relieved that he’s recovered from his coma, but he doesn’t seem to realise that she doesn’t fit in here. It’s clear after a few days that his intimate knowledge of the First Order makes him a valuable asset, as he is able to counter and challenge strategies presented by even General Leia herself while Rey is still trying to follow the beginning of someone else’s sentence.

These are her friends. These are the people that believe in her.

But Rey can’t sit still much longer.

She grabs her staff and pulls on her shoes. She walks down the claustrophobic corridors, following their winding twists and turns through the earth until she gets to the front entrance. She pulls on one of the protective suits and starts the procedure to open the doors. She turns off all the temperature alarms so no one will hear her and grabs a radio so she can get back in.

The door groans into life. As soon as there’s a crack big enough for her to slip through, Rey finds herself out in the blisteringly white tundra of Fryst. She can’t see anyone else for miles. She can’t see anything else except the icy white surface. She straps her staff onto her back and starts to run.

It’s been a while since she pushed herself like this. She can feel her body start to resist, but she pushes through it. There’s no use giving in so easily. There’s no use disregarding the full freedom that she can enjoy right now. She runs in the exact same direction, down the exact same path. She relishes in the feeling of real ground beneath her feet, small streams of light flickering across her face and wind through her hair. 

This is how she is supposed to feel. Like anything could happen at any moment. She runs and runs until she absolutely can’t keep going, and it takes a long time for that to happen.

She collapses onto the ice and lets herself truly breathe for the first time since stepping outside. She takes big, greedy mouthfuls of air and tries to convince her heart to return to beating normally. It doesn’t want to listen.

“I thought you had disappeared.”

In an instant, Rey pulls her staff off her back and is up off the ground. She knows what is happening, but she’d rather it was a predator in front of her. No such luck.

“I thought you were gone for good.” She can hear his voice clear as day. Cutting through her thoughts clean as ice. She knows that he is reading them, scanning them for any thoughts reserved for him. She is doing the same thing.

“I tried to get rid of you,” Rey says.

“I know,” Kylo says. “I held on.”

“I know,” Rey says. “This is a small moment of weakness.”

“You are restless,” he says. “You are ready to fight, but everyone around you is still happy to talk.” It’s what Rey has been trying to find words to describe for weeks. It’s what she can’t make anyone else understand, and he’s figured it out in seconds. “You’re not weak.”

“Believe me,” Rey says, activating the radio so she can pick up the frequency from the resistance base. “It won’t happen again.”

She continues to run.

 

After that, Rey hears his voice almost daily. Just a few sentences at a time, trickling into her mind like water flowing through a stream. Sometimes she replies; others she leaves him alone with his thoughts. Sometimes he asks questions that she cannot answer.

He seems perplexed by the fact that she left.

“I know what you’re feeling,” he says. “I can sense it in you. It is the same as me.” Rey knows what he is talking about. She saw herself sitting, abandoned, on Jakku, in him. She saw herself made alive by the force, in him. She saw all of that behind them. She saw more in their future.

“We are cut from the same cloth,” he says to her. “Can’t you see?”

She hates the fact that the only person in this whole universe who understands how she feels could believe in a future so dark.

 

Rey sits on the floor of her room, the original Jedi texts spread out in a circle around her. She’s very careful to turn the pages slowly, not wanting to leave a trace of herself on such old books. They all seem to be written in the same language, but she has no idea what it is. She’s lost without a cipher or code. She’s also confronted by the fact that it’s a written text, because while Rey can speak several languages, she learnt them all by listening and repeating. Borrowing words that came out of other people’s mouths. 

But some of the books have drawings and diagrams, so she starts by studying those.

She’s drawn to a diagram depicting what must be a kyber crystal inside the deep blue book. Maybe she’s too set on looking for one of her own, given that she carries the lightsaber pieces wherever she goes, but she doesn’t know what other shiny, powerful object it could be. She can understand the mechanics explained in the diagram, but there are pages of text either side of it that must detail more than she knows.

She pours over the book at nighttime, when she’s not helping the resistance rebuild. She copies out the different, symbols over and over and starts to recognise patterns. She can draw most of them free hand now. Pages and pages of them flood her room. 

But she still has no idea what they mean.

“That’s going to take too long,” Kylo says.

“How else am I supposed to do it?” Rey snaps. “I don’t have the code.”

“You could ask someone who knows how to read it.”

“I can’t ask Luke.”’

“You could ask me.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“Not even if I could give you the code?”

“How could you do that?” Rey asks. “I can’t even see you.”

“Like this,” Kylo says, and Rey can feel his thoughts again. She can feel the code sinking into her own mind, settling next to the languages she learnt on Jakku. She looks at the chart of symbols she has drawn and finds that she can write out their meanings. She scrambles to translate the pages, frantically jumping ahead of herself in trying to read what it has to say.

“It tells me where to find them,” she says. It is even better than she could have ever hoped for. There is a list of planets where they grow, but it is old and outdated. Think, Rey says to herself. This can’t be the end. Find the answer. It’s just like the language. There has to be an answer.

She sees a pattern in the planets. She runs to the control room for a new map of their system and starts to copy across the pattern from the book, the whole time not wanting to pause until she confirms what she already knows to be true.

There are kyber crystals on Fryst.


	3. Chapter 3

Rey walks deeper into the cave system, trying to follow the map that she has drawn out for herself. She knows that the crystals are here. She can feel it. But she can’t quite seem to find them. She spends hours following different twists and turns through the tunnels but they don’t lead anywhere new.

“Let me help you,” Kylo says. Rey is used to journeying alone, but that doesn’t mean she likes it.

“Okay,” she says.

“I can’t see your surroundings. You have to show me where you are.” And so she does. It feels like the easiest thing in the world, opening up and letting him in. Letting his thoughts flood her thoughts.

“There’s a blue light trail to your right,” he says after a minute. “Follow that.” Rey scans her view again and this time, she is able to spot the almost invisible hint of blue in the air.

“Brilliant,” she says, continuing down the path. The blue light gets stronger and stronger and Rey breaks into a run as she reaches the entrance to the deep mine. 

There are bright blue kyber crystals for as far as she can see. She reaches out to grab one, instantly drawn into its cerulean glow.

“This is beautiful,” she says.

“I didn’t know there were this many kyber crystals on Fryst,” Kylo says. Rey’s mind immediately switches on. The crystal glows a deeper blue.

“You know exactly where I am,” she realises. “And if you know where I am…”

Kylo Ren knows where the whole resistance is.

 

Rey runs and runs until she barrels straight into the resistance base doors because she refuses to slow down, not even for a second. The loud thud also comes with the added benefit of catching the attention of everyone within earshot.

“The First Order are coming!” she yells. Finn rushes over to pick her up off the ground.

“The First Order?” he says. “How do you–”

“I just know,” Rey says. “There’s no time to waste. Sound the alarm!” Finn motions to the other resistance fighters to follow her words and they launch into full siege mode. Finn helps Rey inside just in time for the three layers of blast doors to shut behind them, cutting off the resistance from the outside world. Rey gets up and follows Finn to the control room.

“The First Order are on their way,” Finn says.

“What?” General Leia says. “Where were they sighted? How far away are they?”

“I don’t know,” Rey says. “I just know that they’re coming. I’ll explain later.” General Leia looks at her, and Rey wonders if she already knows.

“Prepare for attack,” General Leia says, and all the commanders immediately leave the room. Finn grabs Rey’s arm and they follow Poe to a line of ground artillery.

“You know how to shoot?” Poe asks.

“Of course,” Rey nods. She lowers herself down into the firing contraption that’s built into the walls of their fortress. She straps in, puts on her headset and turns the weapon on. It peers out through a narrow slit in the wall.

She’s ready for him.

 

But several hours pass, and she’s sitting in the same position.

“Still no signs of enemy activity,” Poe says. The other commanders chime in their agreement.

“And no detection of anything by air?” General Leia asks.

“No, ma’am.”

“Rey,” General Leia says into her headset. Rey undoes her straps and leaves the front line.

“You have to tell me what’s going on inside your head, Rey,” General Leia says. “What happened? What changed?”

“He knows where I am,” Rey says. “And he knows I’m with the resistance. I thought he’d send out ships straight away.”

“So why are we still here?”

“I’m asking myself the same question.”

Rey wonders if she should ask him, but she’s too afraid to reach out again. Because what if he hears her? 

And what if he doesn’t?

 

General Leia issues the order for everyone to drop their forces and resume daily activities. Rey follows Finn to the mess hall where the majority of the resistance fighters are lined up for their evening food.

“Rey, I get the feeling that there’s something you’re not telling me,” Finn says. His words cut into Rey more than they mean to. She hates keeping this from him more than he could know.

“I don’t think you’d believe me,” she says. She moves to pick up her tray of food, but Finn catches her wrist and spins her round to face him.

“Try me,” he pleads. Rey can see the longing and worry in his eyes, just as she feels the electricity open up.

“I’m not coming to kill you,” Kylo says.

“Why not?” Rey asks.

“You’re not part of my past.”

“You know that I’m not here alone,” Rey challenges.

“Maybe we should stop trying to kill each other,” Kylo starts.

“Then what?” Rey asks. “That’s not going to magically fix everything. It’s not that simple.”

Rey can feel Kylo looking right at her. Usually his eyes dart back and forth, but right now he knows what he wants.

“If we stopped trying to kill each other,” he says, “then maybe we could be in love.”

Rey knows that he sees the instant look of shock on her face. Maybe that’s what he was watching for, but he doesn’t look away yet. She tries to take in his words, but has no idea how. She thought he had forgotten that word. She never expected to hear it from his lips.

“I don’t love Kylo Ren,” she says, averting his gaze.

“Rey, who are you talking to?” Finn asks. There are more than one or two resistance fighters looking at her. Rey tries to fight back tears.

“You wouldn’t believe me,” she says. She can’t do this.

Neither can Kylo. It crushes him to hear her words. The connection drops and he activates his lightsaber, trashing whatever is near him. He feels anger coursing through his body. How, after all that they’ve been through, after all that they share together, could she say something like that?

Ben knows why, though. Because Ben is starting to wake up. He has always been there, reminding Kylo what it’s like to be lonely. Now he is reminding him what it’s like to feel warm.

There are two hearts beating inside him right now, and it’s the one of Ben Solo that belongs to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goddamn, this fic took me a surprisingly long time to write. I wrote the first chapter over at least four times before it felt right. I suppose that’s always the way with new characters, gotta find their voices.
> 
> All I know is that I came out of The Last Jedi and I couldn’t stop thinking about Rey and Ben. It was the last thing I expected which makes it all the more impressive. I know that the ship has problems. But they can still have feelings.
> 
> Thanks for reading, I hope you liked it x


End file.
